Behind The Virginia Tech Massacre (TomPaine.com)

[marmar]

Behind The Virginia Tech Massacre
Michael Winship
April 17, 2007



Michael Winship, Writers Guild of America Award winner and former writer with Bill Moyers, writes a weekly column for the Messenger Post Newspapers in upstate New York, where this commentary first appeared.

The National Rifle Association wrapped up its 136th annual convention in St. Louis on Sunday. Sixty thousand attended. NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre fired up the crowd, telling them, "Today, there is not one firearm owner whose freedom is secure."

On Monday, one of those owners shot more than 50 students, staff and teachers at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Thirty-two of them died, the worst such massacre in American history. So much for their freedom.

At that same St. Louis meeting—amidst sessions on African big game hunting, "methods of concealed carry," and quick draw competitions—Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA's Institute for Legislative Action, chillingly warned of an event remarkably like Monday's shootings. Warned, not because of the bloodshed or the anguish it would bring the bereaved families, but because such an incident would give gun control advocates "a green light to do it all," by which he meant, he said, "gun bans, gun registration, gun owner licensing, gun rationing, taxes and fees."

Cox callously declared that for those in favor of stricter gun laws such a tragedy would be "the Hail Mary of their playbook." Hours after his remarks, innocent victims lay dying, shot down by a maniac with a pair of handguns.

Frankly, I wish Cox were right about at least some of what he propagandizes of the vast power of the gun control lobby. How many times do mass killings such as what happened in Blacksburg, Va., have to occur before we get it through our thick, wired for the Stone Age skulls? For that matter, how many times do people have to write a column like this one decrying the insanity of gun violence in America? .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/04/17/behind_the_virginia_tech_massacre.php

[villager]

1. More common sense from the Tom Paine site. Recommended.

n/t

[zanne]

2. It all makes sense unless you're addicted.

I'm convinced that some people are just addicted to guns. They have a disease that causes denial and abandonment of common sense. That's the only answer. The only alternative would mean that these people are just selfish, immature, paranoid psychotics. I'd much rather see them in rehab.

[damntexdem]

3. No need to choose:

they're selfish, immature, paranoid psychotics addicted to guns who deny reality and abandon common sense. And to them, to require that a "well-regulated militia" be well-regulated is to take away its guns.